Today at lunch, Michael was talking a bit about the layoffs happening -- in a company of 150,000, today 18,000 will find out they are being let go. Yikes. So I said,"That's more than 10%!"
Hannah added, "They're decimating the company!" Then she added, with great satisfaction, "I've been waiting to use that word!"
Because although we usually use decimate to mean destroy in a nasty way, it originates from a very unpleasant Roman custom of killing one in ten of the soldiers in the army (or a part of the army) as payback for some crime on the part of one or more soldiers. The ones getting killed may or may not have had anything to do with the problem in the first place.
And Hannah being Hannah needed to get the usage just right.
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